Friday, 30 September 2011

I already blogged something similar earlier on in French. There is less than an hour to September. A weird end of the month really: it is a quasi-Indian summer, the hottest September month in recorded history here. Autumn does not feel much like autumn and I find it uncomfortable. There is one fitting thing though: the end of the month is also the end of the week. I don't know why, but I like when the end of the month is symmetrical to the end of the week.

Sometimes circumstances create them, especially at work. It is almost an Indian summer here. I say almost as it has not been below zero yet. But it is really hot outside. So this week at lunchtime I went out. I always bring my summer coat with me, out of habit, even though I don't need it. A colleague saw me getting back to work, the coat on my arm. She said: "You brought your coat with you? With that weather, you didn't need it." To which I replied: "I brought it, I didn't wear it."

It was absurd , but that's why it was funny. Okay, next time, promise, the great unknown line will be from somebody else.

Thursday, 29 September 2011

An acquaintance asked me this question a few months ago in a local pub and it got stuck in my mind. I thought about it again today, it crept to the surface. I seldom go in local pubs now, I am too busy during the week and too tired during weekends. I like this question, it is polite, friendly, yet it is a warning, albeit a pleasant and mocking one. It is a nice way to offer to pay for a drink. My poison that time, and all the time, is of course beer. Real ale preferably.

Beer is my poison of choice, but I haven't been properly intoxicated with it for ages. I think the last time I was somewhat drunk was in March 2009. But back in my twenties, oh that was a different story. I didn't get drunk every night of course, even then my liver couldn't take it, but I could drink regularly, say one beer before dinner and a glass of wine or two during dinner. Now it is a Friday treat. I rarely go back into drinking on a daily basis, except on holidays. I love to try local products and when I am home I rediscover old friends (and find new ones). I am glad it never became an addiction, although there might have been a risk at some point in my life (but then who doesn't have a flirt with alcoholism?). Life would flavourless without poisons. And now I am wondering: what is yours?

Wednesday, 28 September 2011

Since Halloween is coming, I thought I would put here, from Phylactère Cola, a brilliant parody of the brilliant Nosferatu. The best parodies, the only good ones actually, show genuine love for the source material. This is why I find Phylactère Cola so brilliant: they don't make fun of the genres they parody, they pay homage to it. And a little addendum before you watch it: I once had a beer and chatted with the guy playing the corpse/vampire. We have a common friend.

Tuesday, 27 September 2011

I was wishing happy birthday in Italian (showing off?) to an Italian friend (duh!) on Facebook, someone who was not among my group of Italian friends and whom I lost contact with now, except via Facebook. I just said "buon compleanno", but I felt a bit strange, which I often do when I get in touch via Facebook with someone I haven't kept contact with. I often think Facebook is a gallery of faces, many of them belonging to people that don't exist in my life anymore.

I find it strange that I have friends there which I only met briefly, two weeks in 2008 when I was doing one of the lousiest jobs I ever had (telemarketing). We were all in the same boat, all more talented, more deserving than what we were forced to do and it created a bond that is still present, that I can feel when they comment on my Wall. I do miss them. I miss my Italian friends even more I have to say. Sadly, I did not keep in touch with my friends from my acting class. Not at all. After all the promises, the very strong bond that is creating by sharing an art, nothing happened. We had one dinner. That was it. From my childhood and teenage years, I keep in contact with only a few friends.

A shame, really, but it is very difficult to keep in touch. More so when friends are basically all around the world. It is great to have people from so far away and from so many different cultures that you can call your friends, but they don't exactly live next door... So I am stuck with visiting the gallery of friends that is Facebook, and with my memories.

Monday, 26 September 2011

This one is from a colleague, I don't even know her name, so it is really a great unknown line. So here is the context: I was in the kitchen about to grab a glass when she nearly bumped into me, trying to grab her cup of coffee. She said: "Sorry, I was in my own world."

To which I replied: "It's okay, I am often in my own world."

Then came her great unknown line: "Sometimes it's the safest place to be."

Which is true. And it is reassuring that I am not the only one daydreaming at work. But don't tell anyone.

Sunday, 25 September 2011

The temperature has been warmer recently, but I still feel a chill in the evening that makes me want to eat hearty comfort food. It is the case every autumn: I crave fish and chips (I had some more yesterday), cookies and tea, macaroni and cheese, etc. The last month I had broccoli and cheese, which was delicious, grilled cheese sandwiches and about a dozen different sorts of vegetarian cottage or shepherd's pies. We call them "pâté chinois" in Québec, which differs from the cottage pie as it has cream corn between the mince meat and the mashed potatoes. We have it with beetroots. I used to find little interest in it as a child, for me it was a very common, bland dish. Now, of course, I crave it, as a nostalgic and homesick man, as someone who now enjoys plain food and as it is oh so very hearty.

But in the absence of a pâté chinois, the local cottage pies will do. I don't even mind that they are vegetarian, some of my favourite shepherd's pies are actually vegetarian now. Well, my favourite is: it's this one, the mash being made of Bramley apples and parnsip (very autumnal), the rest is veggie chicken Quorn, peas, carrots and other things. Like many pies, it tastes better when reheated.

Of course, hearty food tastes better when it is home cooked. This pie is easy enough to make and I want to cook it more often. I want to try myself at fish pies, which should be easy enough to do: I know how to make béchamel (although I haven't done so in years), which I did very often in Montreal, where I poured salmon flavoured béchamel on vol-au-vent, another hearty dish that made me survive through many autumns and winters in Montreal. I have limited cooking skills, so the little I know I try to make the most of it: béchamel, mayonnaise, grilled cheese sandwiches and... Well, that's it really. That sums up how much I know about cooking.

A question that came to my mind recently, about blogging: is a blog a chronicle or a self-portrait? I guess it depends of the blog. So I will rephrase my question and split it into two: is my blog, is your blog a chronicle or a self-portrait? It has elements of both: it gives account of current events in one's life in chronological order (it follows the seasons as I say), albeit sometimes tells stories set in the past in no particular chronological order (in my particular case those many nostalgia posts I produce). Then there is the other aspect of blogging: one talks about himself, what he likes and dislikes, his interests and also trivial things that come to his mind (like this post, for instance). It therefore gives some sort of psychological self-portrait. I sometimes wonder if one could identify me in the street after reading this blog.

Friday, 23 September 2011

Today is/was the autumn equinox. So it is officially autumn today. For me it has been autumn for a long time already, but let's commemorate the equinox. Here is a little explanation about the date of the equinox by my brother, which he gave here:

"The equinoxes and solstices are sidereally (or more accurately, solarly) defined, and the revolution of the Earth around the sun is not an integer multiple of its rotations on itself. The year is 365.2422 days, thus these events tend to hover around 2 days on the calendar."

From tomorrow onwards the nights will be earlier and earlier. I don't mind that, I find darkness calming.Now I will set scientific explanations aside. For me, autumn is a state of mind and an aesthetic attitude. Big words, I know. But still... I know it is not very original, but to celebrate autumn on this blog I decided to put here Autumn from The Four Seasons of Vivaldi, animated by Ferenc Cakò. Played to death, but still, it is worth listening.

Thursday, 22 September 2011

I read this piece of news in the Metro today, it made me smile: a family in Wales built a house under a hill, just like a Hobbit's house. The geek I am sometimes (often) with (sometimes) hippy tendencies got envious reading this. Who wouldn't live in a Hobbit's home? You read Tolkien's books and you think that's stuff of fairy tale, modern fiction at best. And yet it is possible. And it looks like it does in fiction. I am not sure how eco-friendly this house really is, but it sure has character. Primitive, yet it seems quite cosy. I have been living in the attic for the last few years (properly in the attic since 2007), it is how I prefer to live, but I do find the idea of living undergrounds, or at least underhill, if there is plenty of light, very appealing.

Wednesday, 21 September 2011

I had to mention it on the blog: today should be the autumn equinox, being the 21st of September and all, but apparently it will only be on the 23rd. In my mind, it starts on the first day of September anyway,but this year it seems that it showed up much earlier anyway. Still, it is the 21st of September today and it sure feels like autumn.

Tuesday, 20 September 2011

I was going through old emails in my inbox (I do this sometimes) and I fumbled on an email from an old Italian friend. The email dated back from 2006, I haven't heard about him since then. He was telling me about his life, he has started trying to become a journalist. His English has always been limited and he always used a lot of direct translations from Italian. In the title subject of his email, he had written: "a kiss from Italy" ("un bacco da Italia", I think). A mark of affection, but which I found very strange coming from a male friend.

And this is something I will never quite understand from Italians: the display of male affection among friends, or even acquaintances. I come from a Latin culture where men and women kiss on the cheeks to greet people, but I always felt strange seeing and experiencing the way Italien men kiss and hug their masculin friends. I know it is the case of many mediterranean cultures, even Southern French do it. I just find it weird. I may have been called "the most Italian of all Canadians" by one of them (hugging me as he said this), but I this is one aspect of Italian culture I will never fully integrate. I am a reserved Northern man when it comes to friendship. But I still miss my Italian friends.

Monday, 19 September 2011

It has been a while since I published a great unknown line. Last Saturday, my wife and I went to the birthday dinner party of one of her friends. I bloggged about it in French recently. I liked the people there, but was tired and not feeling like partying. As I mentioned in my post in French, I am not in my twenties anymore and I could feel it. It was a pseudo Japanese restaurant that turned into a club or quasi-club after 9. The food was okay, but I don't like those iffy concepts, trying to make a restaurant feel young and hip and funky. So halfway through dinner, at 9 o'clock (9 o'clock!), the music became very loud and thy dim the lights to the point where it was borderline pitch black. My front seat neighbour joked that it was now more a disco than a restaurant and impossible to talk without shouting. Then I said, looking at my plate:

"And I like to see what I eat."

It made him laugh. If I ever write a review of the place, I will place this line somewhere. Sure, it is not nearly as intelligent as the last great unknown line that my Italian friend came up with., but it is a neat little efficient line.

Sunday, 18 September 2011

This is another nostalgia post. Years before I read the novel, I was fascinated by Bram Stoker's famous vampire. It only became stronger when I read the novel. But before I read the novel and watched many, many of the movies, my first knowledge of Dracula beyond the traditional images you could find at Halloween and on old poster of movies I did not have the right to watch was a gamebook written by J.H. Brennan called Dracula's Castle. All of his gamebooks had been translated in French at that time and gamebooks was a big craze as a child. His Grailquest series was a parody of the Arthurian legend, not always good, and Demonspawn was a neat pastiche of Conan the Barbarian, done pretty much with a straight face. His Horror Classic Gamebooks were heavy on parodic elements too, but they also borrowed a lot from old horror movies. I loved the book cover of Dracula's Castle, with a Dracula clearly inspired by Christopher Lee. In my mind and until I read the novel, Dracula always looked like Christopher Lee, with the feral, bloodthirsty demeanour that burst from the aristocratic mask.

So anyway, one warm early September afternoon, my brothers and I were bored stiff. It was the last day of a teachers strike and we didn't know what to do with ourselves. We went to a nearby park where we saw an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, who had many gamebooks, including Dracula's Castle. I don't now exactly why, maybe it was because Halloween was already in our minds, but we decided to play a make belief game of Dracula, using the gamebook as source material. I played three characters: William Harker (why not Jonathan Harker? I think because most of my characters were named William and because Jonathan Harker was a XIXth century character and our game was set in contemporary period), Van Helsing (a more sinister vampire hunter, as he was described in the gamebook) and Dracula himself. PJ played a vampire hunter who had stakes that he stick together and turn into a cross (nice little piece of gadgetry) and the others played other vampire hunters. All afternoon, we fought Dracula's minions: vampires of course, but also wolves, devils, zombies, and Dracula, who always had the upper hand. We never got the better of the Count that day, and unfortunately we never played the game again.We were planning a big showdown in the upcoming weeks, when Dracula would be destroyed after we combined our strengths.

To this day I am sad we didn't finish the job. I wish I had played Dracula again, as villains are such interesting characters. It was a silly game really, there was close to zilch of Stoker's story in it, but it had an influence on the years to come. We discovered in the acquaintance we had met a kindred spirit and he became a close friend, even to this day. In our mind, it replaced the Halloween game. Both were children's make believe games, but this one was slightly more adult already, because of the source material. Indirectly, it lead us to Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. We also and more importantly became curious about classic horror literature and started looking for Dracula, Frankenstein and the others in the local library. The Dracula game sharpened our interest in it. On longer term, it made us discovered other classics, XIXth century literature first then more. All this because we were bored stiff one afternoon.

Saturday, 17 September 2011

I stopped quickly at the local fayre today. It seems that there is always one here or nearby. This was a local "carnival", but didn't really feel like a carnival. There were just a few tents, with charity organisations and local societies giving leaflets and selling things. I didn't stay long, but long enough to visit the kiosks of the local operatic society and the local drama society. I thought I might as well, since I miss acting. It will not be any time soon, but I am not sure those two groups are quite right for me.

Maybe I am being snobbish, but the operatic society seems to be doing exclusively musicals and, while I have nothings against musicals per se, I want to do opera. I know my voice probably does not have the strength to sing say Don Giovanni, but even as an amateur among amateurs, one can perform at least some classical arias in a concert. Maybe not all, but some. The drama society seems to be more interesting,and most people there seem quite older than me, but that's a good thing: I have something to offer. And it's quite pleasant, at 34, to be called "young man". But the next auditions will not happen any time soon (they make two productions a year), so I will not hold my breath. They might do a stage version of Allo Allo! which could be quite fun, but I am not sure I'd like to play for two hours an English cliché of a French person, even for a comedy. I didn't fell in love with those yet and I fell in love straight away and completely with all the acting/singing courses or productions I have been in. So I don't know.

Friday, 16 September 2011

I had a rough, tiresome week. I don't complain (or I try not to), this is life, so it often sucks, but it becomes necessary to switch off and cool down on a Friday night. It is a question of survival. So tonight I tried to treat myself. Firstly, I stopped for a drink at the local pub. Then I bought some more beer at home (Guardsman from the very young Windsor & Eton Brewery, which makes me like Windsor more). I flavoured the pizza we had with what was left of olives in a jar (I had bought them for a puttanesca). Some cheap pitted green olives, but I love olives, even cheap ones. It doesn't take me much to be happy, or to find comfort food. The downside to the beer/olives mix is that I am now dehydrated and drinking gallons of water. But oh, what a lovely moment I had! My Friday treats change from week to week, usually it involves drinking, eating and reading (I have piles and piles of books). This Friday, it was beer and olives. And now I wonder what is yours.

Thursday, 15 September 2011

Here is another seasonal post. I will try to vary a bit, but I have to use circumstances. About a week ago, I mentioned that it was feeling and looking like autumn. It is true of the evenings: as I am typing this it is already dark outside. And we are not eight o'clock yet. That time of the evening, we call it in Québec "entre chien et loup", "between a dog and a wolf". It has a deliciously sinister tone. Perfect time to read ghost stories, which I will do tonight if I can.

When shadows are getting taller and the temperature drops,one appreciates more staying inside and enjoying the comfort of home. I used to feel cabin feverish here, not so much now. Not in the evening anyway. Some people find it sad that the days are getting shorter, but I don't mind at all. Autumn is the season of comfort and it is so with its displays of lights and shadows: daylights are never as agressive in autumn and darkness is calming in the evening. And I don't wake up ridiculously early because the bedroom is bright as if it was midday! So I enjoy these early evenings.

Wednesday, 14 September 2011

Okay, this is another gloom and doom post, but I can't help it. I received yesterday an email from an acting school I used to go to when I lived in Montreal. One of those generic emails sent to all former students, about what it coming this term and which class to subscribe to, etc. You read it and it is so inviting. But I live far from Montreal. It would have been fun. I did only one course with them, years ago, but it is only since last year that I started feeling ready to go back to acting.

I say this, yet I haven't done acting since April. I didn't do the next course, for various reasons, and now I don't think I can do acting any time soon, again for various reasons, one of them being that I will lack time. It's not only the weekly class, you need to invest lots of time in it that I sadly do not have. And it is the energy it needs too: I know my classes were energising, but it also requires a lot of it and I am catching my breath enough as it is. So I am feeling stuck: I badly want to find time, energy, to get into the right state of mind to commit myself to acting, and I cannot really do it. And so I get that pang of sadness when I receive those emails. I need to live with it.

Tuesday, 13 September 2011

How about a trivial post after the serious ones I did recently? I take this blog way too seriously sometimes and I forget that trivia is fun. Let's have a mayonnaise kind of topic.

When I was walking back from work, I passed a small take away place that sells Chinese food and... fish and chips. I could smell the fish and chips from where I was. It always has the same effect on me: I salivate like I hadn't eaten in days. As I was famished, it didn't make my condition any easier. So I started craving fish and chips. Badly.

It happens fairly often, more often when the temperature is cooling down and I want hearty food. For me, fish and chips is the quintessential comfort food: rich, delicious, it clogs your hearteries and it fills you up for the night. With lots of malt vinegar and salt, it is simply irresistible. And there is fish in it, so at least there is something about it that is healthy (yes, I'm serious, I am a fierce believer in the virtues of fish). I discovered fish and chips when I started my studies here, it saved me from starvation many, many, many evenings. It also helped me deal with nasty hangovers. I used to eat it fairly often. But I haven't done in a while, which is a shame.The last time I remember eating fish and chips is in the Lake District, back in July 2010. This is way too long. I need to

My dad, during his trip here last April, probably had fish and chips every other meal, by the end of his holidays he could tell me where to find the best ones (in a local restaurant). What struck me in my father's search for the best fish and chips recipe is that something that is so familiar and homey here can be perceived as so exotic. I guess there is something in me that is now British. I usually don't buy them in restaurants, or even pubs, I prefer to find mine in the small take aways. But I will have some soon from Marks & Spencer. Not quite the same experience, but it will calm my craving for a while.

Monday, 12 September 2011

Maybe it is because I have been listening to The Sound of Silence a little bit too often recently, but I keep having these words I used to describe the song yesterday, that it was "about solitude in a crowd". I have this feeling from time to time, sometimes it is stronger than usual. I felt like this last Friday on the way back home in the train, when it was overcrowded with Friday commuters. I felt it again today. I have no social life to speak of since the end of my last acting class, yet I don't crave it right now. I feel like a hermit, a monk or a bear. Maybe it's autumn coming, I don't know, but I do feel slightly asocial.

Sunday, 11 September 2011

I watched the 9/11 ceremonies on TV today. Paul Simon from Simon & Garfunkel sang The Sound of Silence. Strangely enough, I had this song in the head these last few days. It was a fitting song for the remembrance day. I thought Simon looked really fragile and broken. I don't easily cry, but I was very close to tears then.

I associate this song with The Graduate, and September days when I was getting back to university, feeling solitary. It is a song about solitude in a crowd, something we all felt at some point or another. This is how many of us felt that day I think. The Future by Leonard Cohen is for me the song of 9/11 and the new era that the atrocity gave birth to. But this one is appropriate for grief and closure.

Well, it is this day again. I blogged about 9/11 a lot and when I started thinking about this new post, I wondered if I could write something I haven't said. This year again, it is Tracie Harris in her webcomic Atheist Eve who sums it up for me. Otherwise, I have little more to say about the event that I already did here, here and here. I still have the same feeling now.That this terrorist attack was an acto fo devout worship.

Sure, there are some reasons to be fairly optimistic. Al Qaeda is just a shadow of itself, Bin Laden was killed, and apparently New York is thriving. But we also integrated fear, religious fanatics still get a free pass because they are men of faith (regardless of the label of this faith), the sharia is still being applied here in the UK... From the rubbles of the World Trade Center on this day ten years ago grew a great cloud of smoke. I wonder if we haven't been covered by it, covered by the darkness since then.

Saturday, 10 September 2011

Today I had to go to a shopping center, something I usually hate, hate, hate. It was not a bad experience today, because it was relatively short. And it was a fruitful one: I got a warm coat, something I had been needing for a while. I am prepared for the chilling days now.

As usual, I stopped in the nearest bookstore, in this instance a Waterstone's hoping to treat myself. It was not a strange experience as I thought it would be a few weeks ago, but it was not as satisfying as it usually is for me in a bookshop. Case in point: I didn't buy anything. It is far from my favourite Waterstone's: too small, not enough choice, usually too crowded (that I was expecting, but still). There was a section for "autumn reads", which I thought was a neat idea, but it was pretty much only crime fiction. Let there be no ambiguity: I love crime fiction. But surely, there should be horror books among them, for autumn reads? The horror section of this shop was quite poor and plagued by vampire romance. I need to find a better bookshop.

I don't have much to write about this picture. I wanted to put it here for a few reasons: because it's a good picture, because owls are impressive birds, whether they are still or they fly, because it is autumn and I associate this bird with autumn and of course Halloween, which I am already getting in the mood for. Now tell me this owl isn't ghostly. In motion, with its cry it's even more obvious. So I hope my readers enjoy this picture.

Friday, 9 September 2011

I am playing with the blog as a form now. Well, sort of. It is not, like I was fearing not long ago, that I lack inspiration. Tonight it is Friday (still, for a few minutes) and I lack energy. I got a few posts in me, but I would need time and strenght to give them shape. So this post is a non-post, one of those little nothings that makes life. It is not particularly original or new here: I used to write many of those when I started blogging. But before Saturday starts, here is one post about virtually nothing. Stay tuned for something hopefully more interesting.

Thursday, 8 September 2011

...master of none. I love this expression, which doesn't exist in French (tthere are equivalents, but they don't have the same punch), as it describes what I am perfectly. I thought about this when Gwen commented on my recent post about mayonnaise. She was generous enough to say that I was a man of many talents.

She may be true, but I never developed them fully. I am a specialist in almost nothing. I am a medievalist, but never taught medieval literature. I know how to make mayonnaise and I am very good at it, but otherwise I am a limited, even terrible chef. My cakes are often so terrible that I even gave them a name: catastrophy cakes. I do think I am naturally talented as an actor, but I never developed it enough to make it a profession. And I have a beautiful singing voice, but again, I haven't really worked on my voice to grow it it into a professional one. I never even took the risk to become a failed actor, a failed baritone, a failed writer...

Well, at least I can make good mayonnaise, I can sing and given the proper preparation I can go on the stage and be a character. I like the extended version of the expression, which cheers me up: "Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one". I think I might ask this one to be written on my tombstone.

Wednesday, 7 September 2011

A short post tonight. I might sound like a broken record. Not might, actually, I do sound like a broken record. But today was a perfect autumn day. It was sunny, it was just chilly enough, it was windy enough. And the light! Oh the light was simply beautiful. Autumn light always is, in morning or evening. It is a soothing light. Going to work, I was longing for staying outside, just walking around. I am in the mood for tea and biscuits, or hearty food after a long walk in the crisp autumn air. I hope we have this weather over the weekend.

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

This is another anecdotal post. I am surprised to find myself creative, in spite of what I was fearing. Autumn is definitely here: it is cold and gloomy outside, or much colder than it has been, even after the (allegedly) coldest summer in twenty years. It also means that it is now the season of spiders, when they get home for winter. I find spiders beautiful, some of them anyway, but I like them less when they are black and hairy and take over the flat. And I have to take them out myself, which I don't like either (no, my wife wouldn't let me kill them).

Maybe favourite local shop is maybe a gardening/DIY shop, which looks like the most unexciting place you can find, but it is actually quite interesting. They have a miniature model of the old train station that doesn't exist anymore, which in itself makes it worth visiting. But they also have a spider repellent. It is conker based and it smells way too strong, but it does keep them away. I plan to spray some around for the next few days. So for now the smell of conkers, just like the look of a black hairy spider, are for me signs of autumn.

Monday, 5 September 2011

I quickly got inspired today, in spite of my fears of yesterday. Maybe not the most pleasant experience for inspiration, but there you go. It is going to be a lighter post, in tone at least.

So today at work, I went to the nearest sandwich shop to buy myself lunch. I ordered a chicken mayonnaise sandwich, the kind I love and makes me feel better after feeling gloomy. I loooove chicken mayonnaise sandwich, when it is well made. This one was not. I don't know if the chicken was bad. I honestly cannot say. But it had more mayonnaise than chicken, more mayonnaise than bread even. It was a disgusting mess. I love mayonnaise. I have it on chips, with potatoes, with chicken, with eggs, with raw vegetables as dips. But that was too much. And it was not good mayonnaise. I think I could have eaten it without a problem had it been good mayonnaise.

I make my own mayonnaise, when I have time and plenty of things in the fridge to eat it with. I published the recipe here in French. I will publish it in English one day, promise. Knowing how to make mayonnaise is a useful skill. It made me discover things about acting. Mayonnaise is one of the greatest invention of gastronomy. it is simple, rich, it has a subtle yet rich taste and it just makes you feel good, even though sometimes it might make you feel nauseous. When it is bad one, of course you are going to feel nauseous. So the moral of the story is: I better make my own next time.

Sunday, 4 September 2011

I was quoting a few months ago a latin quote: "Nulla dies sine linea". I try to blog every day, one post in French, one in English. I want to keep this blog alive. And I feel right now, with a bit of anxiety, that I am out of inspiration. I feel tired, maybe it's because it is Sunday evening, I don't know. Maybe it's the house chores that took too much time and energy and it got to me. But when I'm looking forward, I feel like there might not be many posts for the next days. I hate this feeling, but I feel drained. I hope the next weeks and autumn bring inspiration. But if my readers don't find many posts, there is no need to worry. I am alive and well, but my mind is blank.

Saturday, 3 September 2011

I recently blogged in French about heroes and villains. Villains of all sorts, in all genres, are fascinating creatures. I don't like caricatures and ridiculous villains, it matters that they have good motivations (complex or simple, they have to be good), but in general I like them to be unambiguously evil. Like Dracula was in the original novel, or say Noah Cross in Chinatown. If they have to be believable, they need no excuse, let alone justifications, for their evil nature. Power, greed, cruelty, they should be in themselves strong enough motivations. In real life, badguys are often amoral, or have a twisted code of honour. Why should they be softer in fiction?

In horror fiction, my favourite villain is by far Dracula. When it comes to crime fiction, the choice is so wide I get lost. Maybe the original Blofeld from Bond's novels, if you consider James Bond novels as crime fiction. There is something bout his puritanism, his work ethics that just gives you the chill. As archetypes, I love to hate a good old evil mobster or wiseguy, or a femme fatale. Again, there are so many to choose from. My brothers and I created in our make believe games a handful of villains that were quite interesting. PJ had invented a sort of modernised Fantômas, named Le Squale (the Shark) and I once played Dracula (him again) one afternoon in September. And years later in Call of Cthulhu I had as a nemesis for the player characters a warlock named Nevill Byron, freely inspired by Joseph Curwen. He was more than a century old yet looked like in his forties and was making the good guy's life a misery.

Last year I blogged about owls, one of those birds that fascinate me. They are impressive creatures, even in captivity. I saw some in the wild (the back garden in Chicoutimi, there was a snowy owl who made a feast of some of the birds there), heard some in the wild...

And last weekend, we went to a country fayre and there was a birds of prey display, including some owls. I quickly took a few snapshots. I will publish more of them in the following days and weeks. You can tell autumn is here and Halloween is coming, I am in this state of mind. I said before that owls are ghostly, because of both their appearance and their cry. Even in the middle of the day, you can easily see why on this picture. It looks terrifying.

Friday, 2 September 2011

A Youtube video that never ceases to cheer me up and make me laugh. It is a parody of a scene from A Clockwork Orange, obviously done by a big fan of the movie. To parodise something is to recognise its relevance, said someone, I don't remember who. The clip is both funny and unsettling, because it is so close to the original scene, the lines played with the exact tone and beat, with the same background music. Even the white teddy bear looks like Alex! And there is something fitting about the teddy bears: they are innocent just like Alex and like him are also feral animals. Parodies can also be full of symbolism and intertext. Enjoy this one.

Thursday, 1 September 2011

I walk outside sometimes in the evening, something I blogged about before. As it was a lovely evening, just cool enough to be enjoyable, we went for a quick walk in a nearby park. Then I saw familiar creatures in the evening shadows, little elusive shadows flying around, between the fire of the setting sun and the growing darkness. Bats of course. We have bats in the garden here, I didn't know they were also in the park nearby, I guess it was to be expected. I felt very much in autumn. Strange that people find bats scary, even downright sinister, there is something shy in their behaviour. Their presence made me appreciate the park, and the walk, even more.

C'est aujourd'hui le premier jour du mois de septembre. Comme d'habitude, je le souligne ici. Pour moi, septembre est le vrai début de l'automne. Il a fait plus beau que la semaine dernière, mais l'air est hors de tout doute automnal: il y a une brise fraîche et les arbres commencent déjà à prendre des couleurs. Et la luminosité est automnale également.
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It is the first day of September today. As usual, I mention it here. For me, autumn starts with the first day of September, not twenty days later. It was nicer today that it has been in the last week, but the feel was most definitely autumnal: there was a cool breeze and the trees are aalready looking more colourful. And the daylight have someting autumnal.